What are web standards?

There is a lot of talk about web standards within the web community but to business owners talk of web standards is like double-dutch. This article will give the low down on what these technologies are and how they relate to your web business.

When we refer to web standards, we are referring to open standards primarily used on the World Wide Web. These standards are laid out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

The W3C is a consortium that produces the free software standards “recommendations,” as they call them for the World Wide Web. The Consortium is headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the original creator of URL, HTTP and HTML, the principal technologies that form the basis of the Web.

Source: Wikipedia

However when we talk to web standards we are more often then not referring to the following technologies.

• XHTML
• XML
• CSS
• DOM (Document Object Model)
• ECMAScript (Standardized Version of JavaScript)

These technologies will form the basis for web applications for years to come and any site built using them with be future proofed for a considerable time. It’s a nice feeling when you know your site will look good in Internet Explorer 15 as it does now.

Designing and building with these standards simplifies and lowers the cost of production, while delivering sites that are accessible to more people and more types of Internet devices. Sites developed along these lines will continue to function correctly as traditional desktop browsers evolve, and as new Internet devices come to market.

Source: The Web Standards Project

So we now know what these technologies are and why they have been put in place. But the bottom line is how are these technologies going to benefit your business?

Return on investment (ROI)

Using web standards to build website, designers can;

• Redesign in hours instead of days or weeks thereby reducing design costs and hours of repetitive work.
• Improve Search engine rankings. Web pages will be little more than semantically rich headings and paragraphs. There will be no messy mark-up for Search engine spiders to crawl through.
• Support multiple browsers, PDA’s, web-enabled cell phones, Braille readers and screen readers without the hassle and expense of creating separate versions.
• Sites built with Web standards satisfy many of the accessibility checkpoints highlighted by the WAI by default.
• Deliver cleaner printed versions of any web page without creating separate “printer friendly” pages or relying on expensive software.
• Move on from HTML, the language of the web’s past, to the more powerful XML based mark-up for the future.
• Future-proof your website and ensure that sites designed with web standards will continue to work in browsers and devices for years to come.

The most obvious and immediate benefit is reduced page size. Load times can be decreased by 25 to 50% as ages become little more than a collection of semantically rich headings and paragraphs with a powerful CSS file controlling all aspects of design and layout. This not only makes pages super fast but makes a far better user experience. World renowned usability expert, Jakob Nielsen (useit.com), notes that users will often close a web page when it takes more than 10 seconds to load so keeping these load times to a minimum is vital.